


Dealing With Canon Impression Limits

by Para



Category: Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey
Genre: Impression (Dragonriders of Pern), Meta, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-18 23:14:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13691862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Para/pseuds/Para
Summary: I ambotheredby canon Pern limits on dragon impression, but I also like playing with canon.  This is my attempt to justify how canon impression limits could have existed as shown in the Pern novels, but not be inherent to dragons, and be changeable for post-canon or AU scenarios.





	Dealing With Canon Impression Limits

**Author's Note:**

> While I don't _think_ it will matter, it could be worth noting that for this, I'm working off of my several-years-old memory of most of the Anne McCaffrey books, plus some assorted pieces of word of god that I've picked up from various quotes. (I skipped Moreta and Nerilka's Story because I am averse to plagues, but I think those are the only two that Anne wrote herself which I missed.) I haven't read the Todd McCaffrey books, so any amendments he made to how impression works are being ignored. Attempting to reread Dragonflight a few years ago resulted in throwing the book across the room halfway through, so it's possible there are fine details somewhere in a book that contradict what I have, but I'm not willing to go search for them, and I'm _pretty_ sure there aren't.
> 
> Also possibly worth mentioning: I actually came up with this idea years ago, and have used it on a few RP sites I ran plus shared it to be used on others I was a member of, so it's possible this premise is floating around out there still somewhere; if you've seen it or some close variation before, that's probably why.

So, as of canon, we know a few things about dragon impression.

  * Dragons impress within minutes of hatching.
  * They can choose riders out of the stands, not only the candidates that are on the sands with them.
  * Dragon impression is restricted by the potential rider's gender and sexuality.
  * Gold dragons only impress to straight women
  * Bronze dragons only impress to straight men
  * Brown dragons impress to straight men
  * Blue dragons impress to masculine gay men
  * Green dragons impress to feminine gay men and straight women
  * For decades (at least) green dragons impressed to feminine gay men only, and not to women at all.
  * Ruth... exists.  We're going to ignore Ruth, because we have no other white dragons to figure out patterns about.
  * Depending on whether you consider Todd's books and/or "you can do it in RP but I won't write it in canon" to be canon, blue dragons might also impress to masculine lesbians.  If this is true, presumably green dragons would impress to feminine lesbians.
  * Dragon impression is also restricted by the potential rider's personality, the details of which I will not list because that's not what I'm addressing here.
  * When a dragon impresses, they are able to speak just as well as any adult (if telepathically).
  * When a dragon impresses, they know their own name, and tell that name to their rider.



We do not know if or which dragons would impress to people that are trans, nonbinary, intersex, bi, pan, or anywhere on the ace or aro spectrums.  (We can certainly make some guesses or our own decisions, but we don't _know_ , canonically.)  We don't know what would happen if a bronze, bronze or gold impressed to someone genderfluid.  We don't know how impression handles the intersection of romantic and sexual orientation (such as: if a man is heterosexual but homoromantic, would is he a potential bronzerider, or a potential greenrider?).

There are... some issues here, obviously, as I am sure we are all aware.  "Nevermind that, in my verse all dragons can impress to anyone and always have" is one way to handle it.  "Nevermind that, in my verse all dragons are going to start impressing to anyone even though they didn't before because I said so" is also an option.  I am fond of both, personally.

However, I _do_ like to figure out ways to fit what I like around canon and vice versa.  So this is how I explain the dragons' impression limits existing in canon, but being malleable beyond it.

The most important element of canon for this theory is the green dragons, and specifically the several decades-to-centuries that they spent only impressing to men.  This is usually explained as being due to no women being available on the sands for the greens to impress to, or at least being further off to the side with a gold egg.  This explanation doesn't work well, however, because dragons have proven themselves to be perfectly capable of and willing to climb into the stands to get the female rider they want.  The relatively easier walk to the girls near a gold egg should not have been a deterrent.

The usual further explanation is that green and gold dragons like different personalities, so potential gold riders won't be interesting to green dragons.  However, there's no reason why every girl standing near a gold egg will automatically have a goldrider personality; even if everyone searching every time for all of Pern's history has been genuinely trying to find goldrider candidates and has considered no other factor, search is imperfect.  A few minutes will not give anyone a wholly accurate view of another person's personality; some goldrider candidates are bound to have entirely different personalities than gold dragons are interested in.  Also, while gold and green dragons are usually described as looking for different qualities in their riders, those qualities are not mutually exclusive; there should logically have been a few women in Pern's history that had personalities which were equally appealing to gold and to green dragons.

All of this also assumes that there are no women in the stands which green dragons might choose.  It's definitely true that hatchings were not as well attended before Lessa and F'lar began trying to invite half the continent, the dragons and their riders at the very least have always attended hatchings, and of course the candidates have been there.  There's no superstition or ban on people watching that is keeping people away, it's just not the custom to invite people from outside the Weyr, so it seems incredibly unlikely to me that the people who live in the Weyr (and _especially_ the mothers and sisters of candidates) wouldn't attend to watch what happens to their sons/brothers.

So, there should have been plenty of girls around that green dragons _could_ have chosen all those years, and yet none ever did.  Why?

Moving back a bit, we're going to focus on the fact that dragons know how to speak as soon as they impress.  Now, the drive to impress could reasonably be genetically encoded into dragons as an instinct, but human speech?  That they have to learn.  And yet they have learned, and learned well, within minutes of hatching.

My theory to explain this, as well as the question of 'how do dragons know who they want to impress?' is that dragons, from the moment they begin hatching (and quite possibly before) are sort of psychically casting about, listening to whatever minds are in range and learning from those minds.  This lets them acquire language, and also learn things like 'baby dragons should impress to candidates' and 'candidates are those boys in white standing on the sands.'  Theoretically, dragons could learn things like 'how to make a really good knife' if a mastersmith happened to wander by and be thinking about that, but mostly, the people that are in range are riders and candidates and hatching attendees, and those people are thinking about the dragons hatching and impressing, and who the dragons impress to.  The dragons, therefore, learn the impression rules this way; if every person that a dragon 'overhears' believes that brown dragons can only impress to men, and then that dragon hatches and learns from the watching minds that it is a brown dragon, it reasons that it can only impress to male candidates and so only _considers_ male candidates, and therefore impresses to a male candidate.

So as long as every person knows and agrees on the limits of impression, the dragons will also learn and follow those limits.  This is why Mirrim and Path are the first green dragon-female rider impression in decades; Path hatches just after a few people (I believe F'nor and Brekke) start theorizing and talking about how Mirrim would make a great greenrider.  Path picks the impression rules out of the mind or F'nor or Brekke or someone else they've talked to and convinced, and therefore considers Mirrim, and promptly impresses to her.  Once that happens, everyone realizes that green dragons can impress to women, and the next hatching's dragons pick up a set of impression rules that include 'greens can impress men and women.'  And any impression limit could change the same way.

Now, there are of course a few weaknesses to this theory.  The shift from green dragons impressing mostly women to green dragons impressing only men would have had to be green dragons picking up and responding to the belief that they _should_ choose men rather than that they _could only_ choose men (probably helped along by there not being female candidates; while _some_ dragons should certainly have been willing to charge across the sands or into the stands for a female rider, not _all_ of them would have been inclined to).

There also could have (and probably should have) been a few dragons at some point who had a large enough dose of ' _you can't tell me what to do!_ ' to deliberately ignore they impression limits they picked up.  My best explanation for this is that it's very difficult to be stubbornly defiant when you're five seconds old and desperately searching for something which you will very quickly die without; even the most obstinate dragon could be too focused on ' _must find my rider now!_ ' to start second-guessing the rules about who they are able to choose from before they successfully find a rider and it becomes moot.

The final resort, of course, is 'exceptions happened and were forgotten.'  Pern, from landing through the ninth pass, covers a bit under 2500 years (assuming I've done the math right).  The occasional dragon or two that impressed to riders of the 'wrong' gender or sexuality could very easily have been lost to history.  Records were lost, or never included the rider's gender/sexuality, or future generations assumed it was an error and 'corrected' it; there are plenty of ways to forget things, the same way that ninth pass Pern had forgotten that women ever used to be greenriders.

The one drawback, of course, is that without evidence it's difficult to change what everyone 'knows' about impression, so it can be hard to arrange for hatching dragons to learn new sets of rules.  Usually this means that some human has to start questioning why dragons impress the way they do first, as happened in canon Pern, but it's sometimes also possible to arrange for a character to be present that just doesn't know the rules; a child from a rural hold, for example, who knows that their big sister is awesome and the bronzeriders in harper songs are all awesome so of _course_ their sister would make a great bronzerider!  And if a hatching bronze happens to fish impression rules out of that kid's mind, then that bronze will consider female as well as male candidates.

Overall, I think this works better to explain why green dragons stopped and then restarted impressing to women than 'there just weren't any women, at all, for decades' does, as well as to explain why gender- and sexuality-based impression exists at all.  It also provides a method for impression limits to be changed according to the needs of a given verse, whether that's removing limits, figuring out how identities that aren't addressed in canon would be handled, or creating new impression limits to explore their effect on Pernese society.


End file.
